Jake Shaner started at the Eastern Shore coastal science lab as a field biologist for the state of Maryland in 2016.

His days didn’t change too much when, eight years later, he accepted a dream job with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He remained at that same lab in Oxford, Maryland, a collaboration between NOAA and the state Department of Natural Resources, looking for ways to restore Chesapeake Bay shorelines and rebuild local oyster populations.

Despite his near-decade of experience at NOAA’s Eastern Shore outpost, Shaner, now 33, was fired at the end of February, part of President Donald Trump’s purge of “probationary” employees across the government. To Shaner, one month from his probationary term’s end, the axing feels more random than targeted.

“I honestly think it’s just like, ‘Let’s throw a grenade into the room and pick up the pieces and see what we can make of it,‘ ” he said.

The Eastern Shore scientist was among more than 800 NOAA staffers fired last month as the Trump administration pushes aggressive — some argue unlawful — tactics to winnow the federal workforce. Firings, resignations and other departures have depleted NOAA’s ranks by about 10%, and staff members are bracing for deeper cuts. NOAA managers have been directed to plan at least 1,000 more layoffs.

The cuts have left former staff in Maryland worried about public safety services as well as the fate of fishery surveys and data sets NOAA has maintained, in some cases, for half a century. Trump officials have also toyed with cutting leases at important NOAA buildings, among them a satellite operations facility in Prince George’s County and a massive weather forecasting center in College Park.

The target on NOAA isn’t surprising.

Project 2025, the Republican transition blueprint repeatedly disavowed by Trump’s campaign, devotes several pages to NOAA’s deconstruction. The science agency is partly responsible for today’s “climate alarm industry,” the playbook states, and “should be dismantled.”

Under the Project 2025 plan, many NOAA divisions would be eliminated, others reorganized, and the functions of some, like the National Weather Service, privatized.

The consequences of these rollbacks might not be immediately obvious, said Tom Di Liberto, a climate scientist and communications official terminated from NOAA, but he said the country’s ability to prepare for disasters like oil spills, hurricanes and marine heat waves has suffered a “generational” blow.

A NOAA spokesperson did not answer questions about staffing or facility changes, saying only that the agency does not discuss personnel or management matters, “nor do we do speculative interviews.”

“NOAA remains dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public and ensure our nation’s environmental and economic resilience,” spokeswoman Jasmine Blackwell said.

NOAA has a $6.6 billion budget and, until recent cuts, around 13,000 employees. The agency has a sweeping mandate to lead much of the country’s climate change research, regulate fishing, chart coastal and deep sea waters, and forecast the weather.

The administration’s move-fast-and-break-things approach was on display last week as officials in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency considered cutting NOAA’s lease at its Center for Weather and Climate Prediction, a 270,000-square-foot building in College Park housing more than 800 NOAA staffers, contractors and visiting scientists, according to multiple news outlets.

It’s unclear whether the DOGE team realized the building’s importance: The facility serves as the nerve center of the country’s weather forecasting apparatus.

Just about anyone providing weather forecasts — smartphone apps, the Weather Channel, the Department of Defense — relies on this facility, said Daniel Swain, a climate and weather scientist at the University of California.

“We can’t afford to not have weather forecasting ability even for a few hours,” said Swain, author of the blog Weather West, “let alone days or months or longer.”

The satellite facility in Suitland was included on a list of properties deemed “not core to government operations,” published and later deleted by the General Services Administration.

The Trump administration’s approach to its research agencies, such as NOAA and the National Institutes of Health, has stoked fear and outcry in the scientific community.

NOAA staff rallied outside their Silver Spring headquarters last week, days after the firings, while some flocked to the Lincoln Memorial for a gathering Friday called “Stand up for Science.”

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who joined protesters at both events, called the firings illegal. Late last week, the Maryland Democrat sent Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, who oversees NOAA, a letter demanding a list of every ousted NOAA employee, legal justification for their firings and information on any potential lease cancellations.

Di Liberto, the former NOAA communications official and Silver Spring resident, is particularly concerned about measures the administration may take to erode climate and scientific research.

“They have one tool in their tool box,” he said. “It’s a hammer, and to them everything is a nail.”

Experts said deeper NOAA cuts could have destabilizing effects nationwide and even internationally, but Shaner warned that “they’re also going to be local.” Among the priorities at his old Eastern Shore lab, researchers work with shellfish farmers to make their operations more efficient and track a bacteria dangerous to human health in local oysters.

Meanwhile, groups that work closely with NOAA have struggled in recent weeks to get information out of the agency.

“Communication channels have been broken to the point where we don’t even hear rumors,” said Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

Leading much research into the Chesapeake Bay’s health, UMCES receives about $15 million a year in federal funds, about a third of it from NOAA. Miralles-Wilhelm said he remains “cautiously optimistic” that funding will remain intact, but acknowledged the difficulty of predicting this administration’s next move.

“There are ideas behind ideology,” he said. “What’s happening seems to be completely thoughtless.”

Cuts also hit NOAA’s Chesapeake Bay office in Annapolis, according to its former director, Peyton Robertson, who knows of at least two staff members fired there.

Robertson worked in various NOAA roles over more than 30 years before retiring as a senior executive in the National Weather Service. He remains in contact with former colleagues and said he worries about curtailments to the Annapolis team’s work, including maintaining buoys to monitor bay conditions, efforts to restore oyster populations in local tributaries — one goal of the bay cleanup effort — and research into the harms of invasive blue catfish.

Many of those fired from NOAA are young, talented minds who dreamed of working there and joined to make a difference, Robertson said.

“That has just been denigrated to no end,” he said. “It makes them feel not only under siege, but also it makes them feel a sense of shame. And it’s horrible.”

Among those fired was Briana Yancy, a marine habitat specialist at NOAA’s Silver Spring headquarters. Yancy, whose work included reviews of the environmental impacts of offshore wind projects and the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse, got into environmental sciences because the work felt immediate.

“It’s something that everyone interacts with on a day-to-day basis,” she said.

Just over a week after her termination, Yancy returned to her old office to pick some things up. She recently received an award — recognition for a presentation and for stepping in when a colleague was on leave — and she still needed to retrieve her winnings: a NOAA jacket, a water bottle, a tote bag and a mug.

These are small tokens of her time at the agency, but to Yancy they serve as reminders of what she accomplished. In a note accompanying the award, her former boss agreed.

“Your work is always top-notch and appreciated,” it said.